The critical voices rising against Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald haven't yet swollen into a full chorus yet, but they're getting there.The film oozes "vulgarity" and "a stunning absence of taste" and a surfeit of "wasted money." All of which was the expected response: Luhrmann has always been gaudy and over-the-top. From Romeo + Juliet on, he has not produced a single restrained frame of film. He makes elaborate movies on crazy sets filled with illusory passions, which makes The Great Gatsby the perfect subject for him. Vulgarity and tastelessness and wasted money are the subject of the book, which is why Luhrmann's version is not only the best adaptation of Gatsby by far (not an impressive claim given the others); it's also one of the best films of the year.

I don't mean to deny the cheapness of the film, or its obvious pandering sentimentality. The Gatsby plot is framed by an appalling bit of business in which the narrator, Nick Carraway, is holed up in a sanitarium for recovering alcoholics, and writes his story as a kind of personal expiation, a healing exercise. Not only is it a gag-producing cliché, it's also the opposite of the actual conditions under which Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby. He finished the manuscript in Cannes, while his wife was running around with a strapping officer behind his back. The novel is the work of a man in a luxurious hotel room watching his wife fool around with aristocrats on the beach, not of some moping, confused, recovering drunk.

Luhrmann doesn't so much wear his heart on his sleeve as slap you in the face repeatedly with it. Jay-Z rapping over what looks like Ken Burns vignettes is utterly transparent: Look, guys, history is just like now! The first time we see Gatsby, Leo DiCaprio's face is framed by fireworks while Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue swells behind. Where I was watching it, in an advanced screening filled with fans dressed in flapper costumes, everybody started laughing at the obviousness of the heartstring pulling. The marketting is also naked and gross. The dance numbers are as embarrassing as Chanel ads. The cover of Vogue is mentioned outright. The film is shot in 3-D, but I could never see why. I assume the word "3-D" made it easier to fund the production, but it didn't help the movie.

So it's a glittering shallow monstrosity. That much is true. But the dark heart of Fitzgerald's masterpiece is also in the film, which saves it. Luhrmann's other confections, like Moulin Rouge!, celebrated excess and then pinned insipid melodramas onto the glamor — the point was always to appear in fashion magazines. Luhrmann's Gatsby is different. The movie runs straight at the ugliness and brutality that underpins the glimmering world. That consciousness of the hollowness of youth and beauty is what takes the story of Gatsby out of the realm of mere historical costume drama and into the world of the classic, and Luhrmann is the first director to have captured that tragic contradiction.

Everyone can understand Gatsby's dream, the desire to recapture the best of youth, to live in a world of infinite possibility forever. But it is the story of Nick Carraway that is more difficult, more painful and closer to the audience's. Carraway wants to watch the lives of the rich kids, in all their easy stupidity and pleasure, and to curse them without turning away. Nick's final line to Gatsby is "They're a rotten crowd. You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." But Gatsby has spent his life trying to impress the "rotten crowd," and Nick doesn't find a better crowd after he leaves them. He's just miserably alone. When Carraway sees Tom Buchanan after Gatsby's death, he writes:

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...

I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace — or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons — rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.

No communist ever made a harsher critique of American wealth, and yet Carraway and Buchanan shake hands. Luhrmann has effectively captured that contempt for the glittering nobodies, even as he has made a film visually drunk on their excesses. It's a feat.

I wonder how much of the hate for Luhrmann's film comes from a hatred for the book? Or rather for the underlying spirit of the book? The release of The Great Gatsby has provoked some fascinating reevalutations of the novel. Kathryn Shulz at New York magazine has given the best attack I've ever read. And here's another good one, too. Both of them hate the book's moral core, which is complicated and not entirely pleasant. Here's Shulz:

[Fitzgerald] is all but inventing a new narrative mode: the third-­person sanctimonious. From the story of America's self-consuming profligacy, corruption, and avarice, he omits himself and his moral proxy — and, by extension, us.

In other words, Fitzgerald, or rather Nick Carraway as his proxy, is both too judgmental and not moral enough — a perfectly accurate criticism that also completely misses the point: That contradiction is exactly what Fitzgerald is trying to articulate. The illusion of American glamor is utterly hollow, meaningless, pointless, but there is nothing else. The rest is a valley of ashes. Only the memories of the dream are worth anything.

Hating The Great Gatsby is easy to do — most readers have probably experienced it first being shoved down their throats in high school. Fashion tries to sell it as a source for costumes at regular intervals, but the fashion never quite catches on. People talk about the elegance of the Jazz Age, but women don't wear diamanté headbands no matter how many times Tiffany hopes they will. Men will not, I believe, start wearing pink three-piece suits with straw boaters because of this film. The hype over Gatsby is ludicrous, and many smart people hate it for that reason. But it's worth noting that the novelists don't. On Twitter, Colson Whitehead wrote, "The Great Gatsby is fine. It's people who hold 'Gatsby parties' who are the worst." Joyce Carol Oates said, "Hating The Great Gatsby (the novel) is like spitting into the Grand Canyon. It will not be going away any time soon, but you will be."

Here's the thing: Luhrmann's movie, and the vast array of marketting that surrounds it, is phony. But so is Gatsby. Gatsby is tasteless and vulgar and spends too much money. Gatsby is the original icon of hype. Which is why his story remains so relevant. The movie could easily have been set in Silicon Valley today. The illusions that Gatsby and Luhrmann create are lies and ultimately cheap and corrupt, but their spell is nonetheless powerful. The critics are unintentionally paying Luhrmann a compliment, I think; his version is not so much a film about Gatsby as the film Gatsby would make about himself. It's the most Gatsbyesque Gatsby possible. What better standard is there for adaptation?

Apparently, Luhrmann is considering doing Hamlet next, with DiCaprio in the lead. "To me, Gatsby is the American Hamlet. What else could we possibly do as a follow-up?" he said. A Luhrmann Hamlet sounds absurd, probably stupid, a potential disaster. I can't wait.